While patching one of my SharePoint 2013 farms with the April 2013 Cumulative Update, I kept receiving an error:

“The installation of this package failed”.

“The installation of this package failed” in middle

FIX:Ran the CU installer again, and it worked.

The best workaround for this issue is to simply run the installation package 3 times. The package will fail to install with the above error on the first two attempts, but should be successful on the third attempt. The installation will not be corrupt and there are no other known issues once you have the update package successfully installed.

Installation error or failure (“product: Something SharePoint could not be installed. Error code 1603. Additional information is available in the log file something.LOG”).

PSConfig/SharePoint Configuration Wizard critical error.

Application content install (rare).

SharePoint services provisioning failure.

Farm/databases upgrade error.

Service applications.

Content database.

PSCONFIGUI.EXE is the UI based configuration wizard which performs several tasks one after the other after installing fixes.
PSCONFIG.EXE is the command line tool which gives users granular control over all tasks that are executed and which is therefor often quicker than PSCONFIGUI.EXE.

On the other hand that means that it is up to the user which operations are performed by PSCONFIG.EXE

Most customers just ran the following command

PSCONFIG -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait

But that command only performs a subset of operations performed by PSCONFIGUI.EXE. E.g. it will not update the files in the _app_bin directory of the web applications!

Looking into the list of operations that can be done using PSCONFIG.EXE gives you an idea about which operations are possible. The yellow marked operations are those that are automatically performed by PSCONFIGUI.EXE after installing a fix.

An exception of type System.DirectoryServices.DirectoryServicesCOMException was thrown. Additional exception information: The service cannot be started, either because it is disabled or because it has no enabled devices associated with it.

As usual the error message are confusing. After a lot of research, tail and error in my development environment.

NOTE: All environments are different environments and depends on current SharePoint patch level, SQL Server patch level etc.

FIX:
Ensure following servers have been STARTED across all the SharePoint servers:

To many factors which influence it (e.g. previous CU level, network speed, CPU, other activities on SQL server, …).
You can speed things up by detaching all content databases before running PSConfig and then reattach them in parallel using multiple powershell windows to perform DB upgrade in parallel for multiple DBs

I can’t accomplish successfully psconfig -cmd upgrade -inplace b2b -wait (after SP2010 April 2016 CU) command as all the time I’m receiving error. From the logs I can see that there is some conflict: Failed to upgrade SharePoint Products.
An exception of type Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPUpdatedConcurrencyException was thrown. Additional exception information: An update conflict has occurred, and you must re-try this action. The object SPClaimProviderManager Name=ClaimProviderManager was updated by domain\account, in the PSCONFIG (3668) process, on machine SERVERNAME. View the tracing log for more information about the conflict. I searched many sites but I couldn’t find any hints. Is there any command which should accomplish SharePoint upgrade successfully ?

Stop the timer service, go to C:\ProgramData\Microsoft\SharePoint\Config\GUID, delete all XML files (you should have many xml files and one ini file; leave the ini file), open the ini file in notepad, replace the number with 1 and start the timer. Watch out, because it will generate a lot of IO, so just give it a few minutes to calm down and run psconfig again.

Whenever I run -cmd secure resources the command fails with UnauthorizedAccessException:

I am seeing the following message even though 7/8 steps were successful (secureresources was the failure): “Configuration of SharePoint products failed” successful configuration settings: 7, unsuccessful configuration settings: 1
sounds to me as if the current user is not a local administrator on the box.